Guest Post by Dusty the Kelpie

The problem with humans is that they have terrible trouble communicating with each other.

Not only are they limited in the frequencies they can hear, they often live far away from each other and growl about not being able to send big files, like footage of my friend Kelp and I rounding up cattle.

When Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull visited Longreach with our old friend Maranoa MP Bruce Scott recently, Kelp and I told him he needs to throw remote communities a bone. They kept talking about broadbone, bonewidth, which was a bit confusing until they got onto mega bites and thousands of them which sounded very promising.

The NBN’s satellite will start offering services next year, meaning our humans on cattle stations will be able to do things that Kelp and I do every day – like remotely monitoring livestock, watering points and fences.

Humans can be so hopeless sometimes.

Malcolm and his friend, parliamentary secretary Paul Fletcher, also spoke about spending $100 million to fix mobile blackspots. They visited Yaraka where people complain about being in the doghouse because they can’t use their phones at all.

Of course, Kelp and I are worried that if they get better at doing things by themselves, there will be less work for us.

That’s why Kelp and I are busy training our humans, like Lachy Cossor at the Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame, to perform tricks like the ‘shoot and play dead’ routine. It keeps him amused for hours and Malcolm and Paul, and even our old friend Bruce Scott, were entertained as well.

But our humans do need to learn some new tricks – maybe they can find an app for that on their smartphones when Malcolm and Paul fix the blackspots around here?